Rüdiger Campe
Biography
In my work, I study practices, genres, and institutions of literature from early modernity to the modern and contemporary. The underlying assumption is that, in such practices, genres, and institutions, literature – la chose littéraire – is not a given but undergoes changes historically and manifests in a plurality of forms culturally. In my earlier books the focus is on the European trajectory from traditional poetics and rhetoric (the practices of art) to aesthetics (the modern philosophy or theory of art and literature: Affekt und Ausdruck [Emotion and Expression], 1990, focuses on interpersonal communication in literature in the context of psychology, physiognomy, semiotics, and linguistics; The Game of Probability. From Pascal to Kleist, 2012 [first, German, version 2002], discusses representation in the moment when traditional verisimilitude was reframed by the “probabilistic revolution”). In my studies on the novel from the 18th century to the present, the novel becomes the focus as the modern genre that allows and requires ‘theory’ (in particular, by developing a ‘novel of institution’ as the supplement of the ‘Bildungsroman’).
My present work explores the practices, genres, and institutions of literature in broader, theoretical, ways. Writing Scenes is a framework for exploring cultural production in the intersections of bodily practices, techniques and technology with meaning. By distinguishing a contract model of communication – the modern European standard model – with representational models of the one speaking with/for another before others I study the legal and political implications of literary forms.
Education
Habilitation: University of Essen, Germany
PhD: University of Freiburg, Germany
Research interests
Early modern to Enlightenment and Romanticism as well as 20th century in German, French, British, American, Italian, and Spanish literature; Ancient Greek and Latin; philosophy from the 17th century to German Idealism and Marx; Phenomenology.
Selected Recent Publications
Advocacy – Fürsprache: The Situation of Rhetorical Speech and the History or Rhetoric, to appear in Arcadia 2025.
Passio und Figura bei Erich Auerbach. Geschichte Europas, Welt der Kulturen (Passio and Figura in Auerbach: History in Europe, Cultures in the World), in Lemke, ed., Leib der Zeit, 2024, 57-82.
Ethik und Ethos. Shaftesburys Characteristics of Men and Manners, Opinions, Times, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschft 22 (2024), 29-46.
Humanities nach den Geisteswissenschaften (Humanities after Geisteswissenschaften), DVjS 97 (2023), 23-32.
Ästhetische Evidenz (Aesthetic Evidence), in Judith: Handbuch Kunstphilosophie, 2022, 373-385.
Implikation. Eine Rekonstruktion von Blumenbergs Verfahren (Implicature. A Reconstruction of Blumenberg’s Philosophical Procedure), in Bajohr, Geulen: Blumenbergs Verfahren, 2022, 17-45.
The Paraclete and Fürsprache in Hölderlin’s Homecoming, MLN 136.3 (2021), 542-560.
Writing Scenes and the Scene of Writing, MLN 136 (2021), 1114-1133.
Die Institution im Roman. Robert Musil (Institution in the Novel), 2020, Zurich Distinguished Lectures. The Art of Interpretation 3, 2020.
Courses
Undergraduate: After the War: French and German Novels; Alienation and Reconciliation: From Hegel to the Ecological Rift, How to Read, I and Thou: Dialogue in Theory and Literature, Being a Person
Graduate: Musil: Man Without Qualities, Writing Scenes, Proseminar, Novels of Institution, Drama I: From the Polis to the French Revolution (with Katie Trumpener), Birth of the Political, History and Meaning (Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, Blumenberg), Cassirer: Form and Function